Why is Shakespeare so mysterious? Because he was a Catholic in an age of vicious persecution

A woman looks at portraits of Shakespeare at the National Portrait Gallery in London

Generations of Englishmen have ignored or smothered the Bard’s 'treacherous' popery

Today is St George’s Day. It is also Shakespeare’s birthday and, believe it or not, it is the day on which Shakespeare died. Apart from the astonishing coincidence that Shakespeare died on his own birthday, it is also singularly appropriate that England’s greatest poet should have been born and should have died on the feast day of her patron saint. It seems appropriate, therefore, that we should celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday with a reference to cricket, that most quintessential of all English sports. Shakespeare is “450, Not Out”, continuing to hit his audiences for six after reaching several consecutive centuries of continuing relevance.

On such a prestigious anniversary it would do well to remind ourselves of the enduring stature of the Bard of Avon.

Arguably the three greatest writers of all time are Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. Of the first of these, very little is known. Homer, it seems, has disappeared amid the murk and mists of history. So great and wide is the chasm that separates him from us that he is almost invisible. What we know of him, for what it’s worth, is gleaned from allusive and elusive clues embedded in his work. Thus, for instance, it is widely presumed that, like Milton, he was blind. If so, like the blind seer Teiresias, he sees more in his blindness than those blinded by their own unwillingness to see.

Much more is known of Dante, a devout Catholic and a disciple of the Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, who lived much of his life as a political exile from his beloved Florence. Perhaps the fact that he is 1,000 years closer to us than Homer might explain the greater knowledge. If so, why is it that such mystery continues to surround the seemingly elusive figure of William Shakespeare? In terms of the time that has elapsed from his time to ours, it would seem reasonable to presume that we should know more about the Bard of Avon than about the divinely inspired poet of Italy, the latter of whom lived 300 years earlier.

Much of the mystery surrounding Shakespeare is linked to the age in which he lived. It was an age in which a large and alienated section of the population was considered outlaws by the state. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England it was a criminal offence to practice or propagate the Catholic religion, an offence that for priests was punishable by death. It is for this reason that England’s greatest poet remains largely unknown. He is unknown, first of all, because he sought to keep his religious life unknown, as far as possible, from the authorities. He is also unknown because later generations of Englishmen erected a myth in the nation’s likeness, ignoring or smothering the Bard’s “treacherous” popery in the interests of a nationally acceptable patriotic iconography. He became the posthumous victim of “patriotic correctness”.

The overwhelming evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism is rooted in the solid facts of his life and in the theological, philosophical and moral truths to be found in his work.

The factual evidence is to be found in documents, such as Shakespeare’s last will and testament and in the spiritual last will and testament of his father; in the persecution of Shakespeare’s family and friends for the practice of their faith; in court cases in which Shakespeare became embroiled; in property that he purchased; and in the sort of acquaintances and friends that he valued, and the type of people whom he considered enemies. All of these historical facts, pieced together meticulously by historians, paint a picture of Shakespeare’s life that points to his papist sympathies.

The textual evidence to be gleaned from his work includes thinly veiled and sympathetic allusions to the work of the Catholic poet and martyr, St Robert Southwell, and a host of allegorical connections in his poetry and plays to the religious and political turmoil of the times in which he lived. At its deepest level of meaning, Shakespeare’s oeuvre can be seen as a dialectical engagement with the opposing forces of Christian orthodoxy and secular fundamentalism, with the Bard’s sympathies clearly falling on the side of the former against the latter.

One consequence of the emergence of the historically and textually verifiable Catholic Shakespeare is the construction of more acceptable “alternative” Shakespeares who can be made to dance obediently to the tune of the “religiously-correct” zeitgeist. Thus the dubious textual scholarship surrounding the “dark lady” of the sonnets was employed by Hollywood to depict an adulterous and hedonistic Bard in the travesty Shakespeare in Love. More recently, the utterly absurd theory that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by the Bard but by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, has been resurrected by Hollywood. This so-called “Oxfordian theory”, which can be demolished with consummate ease with the merest modicum of historical scholarship, forms the basis of the more recent film, Anonymous.

The construction of bogus Shakespeares is an act of treason against the real Shakespeare, who is still being hounded by his enemies 450 years after his birth. In this context, the distortions and fabrications that have dogged the Bard throughout the centuries can be said to be held at bay by the true scholars who are the Bard’s true friends. Set against the baying hounds who have hounded him, the true scholars can be likened to bloodhounds who unearth the evidence that sets Shakespeare and his times free of the falsehood that has surrounded them. Against the dogs of deception and deconstruction, such scholars can be likened to the hounds of heaven. Switching analogies, and considering the significance of today’s date, we might also liken the Shakespeare-abusers to deceitful dragons who have been slain by the scholarly St George. As Henry V might have said, “The game’s afoot; Follow your spirit: and upon this charge, Cry — God for Shakespeare! England and St George!”

Joseph Pearce, writer in residence at Thomas More College in New Hampshire, is the author of three books on Shakespeare and is editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions of Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear

Comments

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paulpriest

How many of these articles have we now had over the years?
Oh it’s the 23rd of April – let’s bring out a “was Shakespeare Catholic?” article
Come on guys – we deserve better!!!
How many conflicting positions?
Shakespeare definitely was a Catholic: Shakespeare definitely wasn’t: We can never know: It doesn’t matter: Catholics should stop trying to make Shakespeare Catholic when he wasn’t – we should reclaim a heroic Catholic in hiding Shakespeare etc, etc, etc….

Cognitive dissonance now turning into a cacophony

Rob

We don’t know the exact date of Shakespeare’s birth. All we know is the date of his baptism. For reasons unknown, some insist upon making assumptions about the date of his birth and then presenting their assumption as fact.

Benjamin Vallejo Jr

Unless a document is found stating that Shakespeare was a Catholic, everything else is circumstantial. The fact is that he was a communicant of the Church of England. He was baptised, married and buried under CoE rites. To this day we have Anglicans who completely accept Roman Catholic teaching and unless they make a formal declaration as Roman Catholics they remain Anglican.

John

The comments about the actual date of Shakespeare’s birth and then the contention that he was (secretly) a Catholic are a creation of nonsense out of nothing. If this writer has real evidence of the Bard’s birthdate perhaps he should pass it on to real scholars. Perhaps Shakespeare was a Catholic, perhaps he was an Anglican, perhaps he was an agnostic. Who knows. All we do know is that he was writing in an age when Christianity in its various flavours guided society..

mikethelionheart

He lived in an age when not attending the CofE could result in fines and imprisonment. So the fact that he (apparently) attended the CofE is completely irrelevant.

Dorotheus

Irrelevant to what? The fact that someone attended the parish church does not in itself mean they were only trying to avoid fines. They could have done so from genuine personal conviction for all anyone knows.

What interests me is the recurring desire of some to prove that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Would it make him a better dramatist if he was? Would it add lustre to the Catholic Church? Two of the greatest composers of religious music, loved and admired as such by Catholics as well as everyone else, were not Catholics – Bach and Handel. What follows? The Catholic Church is not the source of all good. Do we not need to accept that?

Tylers_Twin

There is an academic tradition that claims Bach converted whilst in Italy…

My own view on the bard is that he was a franchise and many different writers wrote under the label – a bit like “The Simpsons”.

Catholics are a bit like Jews in so much as they want the best for their people. The risk is that if we don’t claim him then the atheists will. JPII summed it up: totus tuus.

If Shakespeare was a Catholic why did he serve Tudor propaganda by blackening the reputation of Richard III, last monarch of the illustrious Catholic Plantagenet dynasty, in favor of the usurping Henry VII? Mr. Peace should admit he is arguing a hypothesis rather than a corpus of proven fact. If Shakespeare was a recusant he was content to watch his fellow Catholics tortured and executed by the patroness of his plays. As has been noted by other commenters, Shakespeare’s religious identity is an enigma. I have seen a scholarly book arguing that Shakespeare was an Anglican. Until more information is forthcoming no one can say for certain.

A. Redding

“There is an academic tradition that claims Bach converted whilst in Italy…”

Sorry, boss, but Bach never went to Italy.

(Handel, admittedly, did. But there’s not a scrap of evidence that Handel converted to Catholicism any more than Bach did, even though while working in the Italian peninsula Handel did write music for Catholic ceremonies.)

Athelstane

Perhaps because the Plantagenets, in the main, were not the most admirable royal dynasty either.

Which goes right back to their origins. As Richard I Coeur de Lion once said, his House had “come of the devil, and to the devil they would go.” He might have had his father (whose knights had martyred St. Thomas Becket) in mind, but he could have been thinking of more than one of the later scions of his house.

Trimming one’s sails in the Age of the Tudors was understandable, given the probable price of any hint of political (or religious) dissent. Richard III was not the rogue painted by Holinshed, More (another devout Catholic who took the histories of Richard III at face value) or Morton at face value, but neither was he an admirable paragon of virtue, either.

We will likely never know for certain if Shakespeare was, in fact, Catholic. But there’s a pretty good stack of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was.

James M

“Arguably the three greatest writers of all time are Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.”

## Homer & Dante, definitely – but not Shakespeare. Milton, possibly, or maybe Virgil. Shakespeare might be in the top 10.

As for Shakespeare being Catholic – this is an hypothesis, nothing more. William Byrd was Catholic, St. Robert Southwell was Catholic – but Shakespeare ? Maybe, maybe not.

Peter S

One of the greatest apologists for the Tudor Dynasty and especially the cruel and usurping Henry VII was St. Sir Thomas More, now I’m pretty sure he was a Catholic!!

To assume that because Shakespeare was a Tudor apologist he couldn’t have been a Catholic is nonsense. We need to make sense of the religious confusion of those times where even until the end of Elizabeth’s reign there was enormous sympathy for Catholicism among the people. See Eamonn Duffy’s “The Stripping of The Altars” and “The Voices of Morebath”.

I actually don’t care whether Shakespeare was Catholic or not but his sympathies and knowledge of Catholicism were obvious. See “Will in the World” and “Shadow Play”

Bob Faser

This is a fairly well-established theory. I remember reading articles making this point (based on themes in Shakespeare’s plays) decades ago. A significant theme in the tragedies is the chaos caused by disrupting an established order. A number of Shakespeare scholars seem to have worked from this point to the idea that Shakespeare was a Catholic (or at least had Catholic sympathies).

Catholics were often christened in the C of E because it was a valid Christian baptism and a matter of public record. Catholics were often had a secret Catholic marriage and then a public C of E marriage to make the marriage legal in the eyes of the state. Catholics often had C of E burials because there was no alternative available to them.